Indulge Your Inner Word Nerd

What prepositions are used with assimilate?

When assimilate is followed by a preposition, transitive senses 2a and 2b commonly take to and into and less frequently with; sense 2c regularly takes to; sense 3 most often takes to and sometimes with. The most frequent prepositions used with the intransitive sense are to and into.

Examples of assimilate in a Sentence

Over time, most of the inhabitants of the "Little Italies" … assimilated rapidly to the society … —Stephan Thernstrom, Times Literary Supplement, 26 May 2000

Those groups were eagerly assimilating into the larger culture and rejecting their own cuisine … —Corby Kummer, New York Times Book Review, 16 Aug. 1998

The mistaken attempts to assimilate Lindner's paintings into the Pop Art movement in the 1960s … —Hilton Kramer, Arts & Antiques, January 1997

Children need to assimilate new ideas.

There was a lot of information to assimilate at school.

Schools were used to assimilate the children of immigrants.

They found it hard to assimilate to American society.

Many of these religious traditions have been assimilated into the culture.

Recent Examples of assimilate from the Web

This is bad for all Californians because disaffected Latino voters are ultimately stalled from assimilating into a broader society, as Italian and Irish immigrants did generations ago.

Things turned around in the second half as Gaskin was assimilated into the offense, Browning played well and the defense took control, but the Huskies still settled for field goals on a couple of forays into the red zone.

Muna Duzdar, a state secretary in the office of Chancellor Christian Kern, told reporters in May that the measure was part of a broader package intended to help immigrants assimilate to life in Austria.

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'assimilate.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.

Linguistic assimilation?

There are a handful of words in English that are examples of themselves, representatives of the very things that they describe. One such word is sesquipedalian ("having many syllables" or "characterized by the use of long words"). Another example, in a slightly less obvious fashion, is assimilate.
When used as a technical word to describe a certain process of language change, assimilate refers to the habit that some sounds have of becoming more like the sounds that are close to them in a word (see assimilation, sense 3). For instance, the original spelling of immovable in English was inmovable, and over time the n began to sound more like its neighboring m, to the point that it actually became that letter.

Something similar occurred before assimilate was a word in English. Assimilate comes from the Latin prefix ad- (meaning "to, towards") and similis ("similar"). Over time the d of the prefix ad- assimilated itself with the s of similis.

Origin and Etymology of assimilate

Middle English, from Medieval Latin assimilatus, past participle of assimilare, from Latin assimulare to make similar, from ad- + simulare to make similar, simulate

Recent Examples of assimilate from the Web

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'assimilate.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.